Everything Except
Thursday she worked like a person with nothing on her mind, and did it well, which by then was the only skill she had left that still functioned.
She closed out the inspection schedule. She read the Warrick Street annex twice and found a rounding convention in the Castellane numbers that nobody had flagged since March, and sent it to Farrah with two lines, and Farrah wrote back good catch, that’s ours, we’ll fix it inside the hour.
She sat in a ninety-minute committee meeting in the seat that would be hers formally on Monday and ran the second half of it without anybody noticing the handover had happened.
Twenty-nine hours.
Mara caught her at the elevator at half past four and looked at her for slightly too long.
“You’ve gone somewhere.”
“I’m standing right here.”
“You’ve gone somewhere and I’m not going to poke it, because I said my one sentence weeks ago and I meant the one part.” Mara pressed the button for her. “But I want it on the record that I noticed, so that later, when you tell me, you can’t do the thing where you say nobody saw.”
“Noted.”
“Don’t note me, Marlowe. I’m being sincere and it’s costing me.”
Jo laughed, which surprised them both, and Mara looked briefly pleased with herself and got out on thirty-eight.
At six she went up.
She had not decided to. She had decided nothing all day, which was the point — she had run a full working day on competence alone, with the decision sitting in her chest untouched, and at six the building emptied and there was nothing left to be competent at.
He was on the phone when she let herself in. He raised a hand, mouthed four minutes, and turned back to the window.
Jo put her bag on the bench.
Then she stood in the middle of his living room in her coat and watched him work, the line of his shoulders, the hand flat on the sill, the voice doing the thing it did where it said less and less until the person on the other end filled the gap with everything they had been holding back.
Twenty-nine hours, and she was going to have to end this, and he was standing eleven feet away negotiating a rate spread.
She looked at the bag on the bench.
It had been on that bench, in that position, four nights a week for three weeks. He walked past it a dozen times an evening. He had noticed it eight days into the distance and had asked her about it once, in an atrium, and had accepted her answer and never raised it again.
She took her coat off.
He hung up and turned around and she was already crossing the room.
“Hi —”
She kissed him before he finished the word. Not gently. She got a fistful of his shirt at the collar and pulled him down into it and he made a sound against her mouth, surprise first and then not surprise, and his hands came up to her face and she took them off her face and put them lower.
“Jo.”
“Don’t ask me anything.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you anything.” His voice had already dropped. “I was going to say hello.”
“Say it later.”
She got his tie off. She had done it a hundred times and it had never once come off this fast, and he let her, watching her do it with an attention that had nothing casual in it, and when she got to the buttons he caught both her wrists and held them.
“Look at me.”
“Alexander —”
“Two seconds. Look at me.”
She looked at him. Whatever was in her face he read for the whole two seconds without saying a word about it, and she watched him decide not to ask, and the decision cost him something she could see.
“All right,” he said, and let go of her wrists.
She got the rest of the buttons. He stood and let her, which was not his habit — his habit was to take over somewhere around the third one — and the standing still was him doing what she had asked in the only language available.
“Bedroom?”
“Not yet.”
That was the moment the evening turned over. She had asked him for something and he had given it to her without requiring an explanation, and she took it, and she would think afterward that this was the exact transaction the entire three weeks had been made of.
It was not like Friday and it was not like the Saturday before.
Those had been fast because she wanted them fast. This was slow because she could not make herself hurry, and the not-hurrying was the worst thing she had ever done to herself.
She got him out of his shirt in the living room and out of the rest of it in the doorway, and she took her time over it, and she made him stand there while she did.
She put her mouth on his throat, his collarbone, the flat of his chest, the ridge of his hip.
She got down on her knees on his floor with her hands braced on his thighs and took his cock in her mouth, and she heard the sound he made above her, and she did it slowly, thoroughly, for a long time, with her eyes open.
He said her name twice. The second time it came apart in the middle.
His hand found the back of her head and stayed there without pushing, and she took that for what it was, and she did not stop. She had never done it like this — not as an opening move, not on his floor with his shirt still half on him and the lamp not even lit yet, not with this much time.
She heard his breathing go and change and go again.
“Jo — stop, I’m going to —”
She stopped when she chose to and not before, and got up, and his hand shook when he put it in her hair.
“What are you doing,” he said.
Not an accusation. He said it the way you say a thing you have noticed and cannot place, and she had no answer that she could give him, so she gave him the true one that was not the true one.
“Everything,” Jo said. “I want to do everything.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got tonight.” She got up off the floor and stood in front of him, close enough that he had to look down. “Do you want it or do you want the conversation?”
He looked at her for a second longer than was comfortable for either of them.
“I want it,” Alexander said. “And I want you to know I’m choosing that, and that I know what I’m choosing.”
It was the most honest exchange they had all night and neither of them acknowledged it afterward.
He took her to bed and he did not let her keep control of it, which was correct and which she had wanted from the second she walked in and had not been able to ask for.
He put her on her back with her wrists in one hand above her head and took his time, and this time the slowness was his, and it was worse.
He went at her with his mouth until she was making noise she had no ability to manage, and then stopped, and then started again, and the third time she said please and heard herself say it and did not care.
“Say it again.”
“Please.”
He did not make her wait after that. He gave her what she asked for, and she came with her wrists still in his hand and her spine off the bed and her eyes open on the ceiling, and it went on long enough that the end of it hurt.
She did not get thirty seconds.
“Again,” she said.
“Give it a —”
“Now. Again.”
And he laughed, wrecked, low in his chest, and said “all right,” and did it again with his fingers and his mouth and no interval at all, and the second one tore through her so hard that she got a hand over her own mouth and he took it off and said, “No. Let me hear it.”
She let him hear it.
“Come here,” she said afterward, when she could form words, and pulled him up the bed by the shoulders until he was over her, and got her hand around the back of his neck. “I want to look at you for a second.”
“You’re looking at me a lot tonight.”
“I know.”
He waited. He had every opportunity there to ask, and she watched him decline it for what must have been the twentieth time in three weeks, and she understood with complete clarity that he was doing it on purpose and at cost, and that he had decided somewhere in the last week that not asking was the gift and was going to keep giving it until she was ready.
She kissed him so that she would not have to hold that thought.
She was still coming down when he turned her over, and she went where he put her, on her front with her cheek against the sheet and her hips up, and he pushed into her from behind and stopped there with his hand flat between her shoulder blades.
“Still?”
“Still.”
He did not go slowly after that. He had let her set every pace of the last hour and now he took it back, and Jo held on to the headboard with both hands and let him, and there was a stretch in the middle of it where she stopped being able to think about tomorrow at all, which was the only reason she had come up here and the only mercy she got all week.
She came a third time like that, with his hand in her hair and her own voice unrecognizable, and afterward she could not immediately move her legs.
Afterward, for about four minutes, they lay in a wreck of a bed and neither of them said anything.
She had her face against his shoulder. His hand moved on her back, slow, in no pattern. Twenty-seven hours.
“You’re going to have to tell me at some point,” Alexander said.
Jo’s whole body went still.
“Not tonight.” He said it into her hair. “I’m not asking tonight. I’ve watched you carry something since about the middle of last week and I’ve decided not to go and get it, because the last time I went and got something out of you before you were ready it cost us both twelve days.”
“That’s not —”
“I’m not finished, and this is the only part that matters.
” His hand kept moving. “Whatever it is, I want you to know that I’ve already decided how I’m going to be about it.
I did that on Sunday. I sat here on Sunday while you were asleep and I worked out what I’d do if it was bad, and I’ve done the thinking, and it’s done.
So when you’re ready you don’t have to manage me. That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
Jo lay against him in the dark and understood that he had just, without knowing it, removed the last obstacle in her way — that he had spent his Sunday building her a soft place to land and had come and told her it was there.
Twenty-seven hours.